“You didn’t tell me, Spud.”
“Why ruin dinner?”
Tejeda chuckled. “Find anything?”
“Inside the shack?” Vic shrugged. “Possibilities. Old stains, old papers; too early to tell.
“Now, the arm …” Vic beamed. “That was a piece of cake. But weird. Very weird. Couple weeks ago, a transient lay down on the Southern Pacific tracks outside town for a little nap. Then the nine-ten Amtrak from L.A. came along, snagged him on the undercarriage, and deposited him piecemeal between here and San Diego. You may have seen the story in the papers.”
“Must have missed it.”
“Otis reassembled as much of him as he could locate, had him bagged for a pauper’s burial. But someone who read about him donated money—anonymously—for a funeral, so he was sent to a local mortuary. They cataloged him in on Tuesday. But when they went to put him in a coffin Wednesday afternoon, they found an arm missing.”
“Careless of them,” Tejeda said. “Any idea how the arm got from the mortuary to my backyard?”
“Maybe.” Vic shrugged. “Mortuary had a power failure Wednesday morning. Mortuary people were scurrying around, trying to keep their paying guests iced. Anyone could have come in unnoticed. And gone out.”
“Anyone notice an electric-company worker?” Tejeda asked.
“Yep.” Vic grinned. “Drove a big gray American-made car. Like a Cutlass.”
“Hey, Vic,” Mark called from the freezer. “Give me a hand, will you?”
Definitely a wild-card play, Tejeda thought. Someone who hadn’t the stomach to generate his own cadaver parts had gone to a lot of trouble to find some already rattling around loose. But why? He took a step into the freezer to watch Vic and Mark open the locker.
“Full house,” Vic said, his cigar gripped between his teeth. “Tell Lou to bring me a meat tray.”
Eddie Green, watching Vic pull freezer-wrapped white bundles from the locker, handed Tejeda a tiny plastic evidence bag.
Tejeda held it up to the light. “Sand?”
“Beach sand,” Eddie said. “Quite a bit of it on the floor around the butcher block.”
Vic had plunged a meat thermometer into one of the larger bundles. “Hey, Lou, how cold’s your freezer?”
“Zero,” Lou said. “Minus ten when the door isn’t opened for a long time. Right now it’s zero.”
Vic extracted the thermometer and held out the bundle to Lou. “Weigh this for me, will you?”
“I ain’t touching it. Weigh it yourself.”
“No sweat.” Vic helped Mark roll out a meat tray mounded with white packages, some long and thick, others no more than a handful. While Mark and Vic meticulously weighed and recorded each bundle, Tejeda stood back and tried to judge the total bulk of the load. About the same size as an Eagle Scout in a sleeping bag, he decided.
“What the hell is going on?” Otis Washington swept in, carrying a gust of fresh outside air. His cheeks and nose glowed with a shiny bourbon flush. When he spotted Tejeda he grinned and tottered toward him. “And what the hell are you doing here?”
“Just tagging along.” Tejeda suffered through a boozy hug.
“I knew you wouldn’t let us down, Roger,” Otis wheezed. “That fuckin’ City Council can take a flying leap, right? I called that asshole down at the paper, what’s his name, Craig Hardy. Told him to wait up for a big story. I figured if there was nothing here, we could fill him in on the mortuary caper. That’ll hold the Council off through the weekend.” Otis found a half-pint flask in his coat pocket and took a dose. “After Monday, when Arty’s trial gets under way, the public will think we’re saints and we’ll be back on the budget A-list.”
Tejeda just smiled. Otis’ budget problems had nothing to do with Tejeda’s reasons for sticking to the investigation. He thought about setting him straight, but after a whiff of the vapor Otis exhaled, he knew it was pointless. Anyway, as long as he was there, what did it matter why?
Vic had hardly looked up when his boss came in. He had been busy slitting the end of each paper-wrapped bundle and sorting them according to some plan.
Eddie stood beside him, a bit green around the mouth, making notes and listening to Otis. Occasionally Eddie would nudge Vic and they would mutter something, as if sharing a long-standing private joke. Twice Tejeda overheard “Betty Ford Center,” where Otis had spent his summer vacation drying out.
Refortified from the flask, Otis shuffled over to the scales and leaned heavily against the counter. “Tell me what you found, Vic.”
“This is just preliminary, right?” Vic said, thumbing through the notes. “We have here the dismembered remains of a Caucasian male, well-built, well-nourished. Rough guess makes him maybe five-eight to six feet tall, one hundred and seventy pounds.
“Take a look, Otis.” Vic opened the top of the largest bundle. “Abdominal fat’s white, fairly soft. I’d say he was young. Certainly well past puberty, but under thirty. Once we get a look at his epiphysis in the lab, we’ll get closer on the age. Right now it would help if we had the head.”
Feeling prickly all over, Tejeda moved in. “No head?”
“No head in locker one-oh-nine,” Vic said. “Mark, maybe you and Lou could go check the other lockers in the tier.”
Otis had peeled the freezer wrap further down, exposing a bare torso. Frozen and bloodless, it looked to Tejeda like a fragment of a Greek statue carved from white marble. The skin was smooth, shiny, the muscles firm. It suggested a perfect young male form. Until he looked at the raw edges.
“How old was Wallace Morrow?” Otis asked.
“Nineteen,” Vic said.
“Think this is a match?”
“Consistent as to size, age, coloring …” Vic flipped the torso over. “But look: we’re missing only the first five cervical vertebrae.”
“Only five?” Otis’ flask reappeared. “Damn.”
“Morrow had vertebrae one through six attached,” Vic said. “I’ve never seen a body with two number-six vertebrae. Anyway, this corpse is too fresh.”
The room started to spin. Tejeda pressed a hand against the hammering in his head and broke out in an icy sweat as a surge of nausea rose through him. Black fog swirled through his mind and he fought it, focusing on the sliver of light at the edge of his consciousness. He knew he was losing it again, but there were things he had to do.
By putting one foot in front of the other, he managed to get out of the packing room. He barked his shin on an office chair, sat down in it, put his head between his knees, and waited for the void to sweep him away. But nothing happened.
Taking deep breaths into his cupped hands, Tejeda felt the fog clear as the attack passed. His brain felt like scrambled eggs and the overhead light pricked his eyes like silver in sunlight, but the relief he felt nearly overwhelmed him.
Eddie Green hovered over him. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” But his hands shook when he picked up a desk telephone and passed it up to Eddie. “Do this for me.”
“Sure. Who you calling?”
“You know,” he said, and hoped Eddie did, because he couldn’t have come up with a name to save him.
Eddie dialed, waited a few moments, then spoke into the receiver, “Let me talk to Kate.” He handed the telephone back.
“Kate?” Tejeda said when he heard an extension pick up.
“Roger, are you okay?”
“Yes. Did the kid show up?”
“Not yet. How did you hear?”
“Hear what? We’ve been looking for him all day.”
“Oh,” she said, and there was a pause. “You mean Lance?”
“Lance?” He gave it a moment to register. “Yes. Who else?”
“Lance showed up right after you left,” she said. “He ran into an old friend on the beach, he said.”
“Thank God.” Tejeda let the image of the white-marble torso fade. “We’ll be home soon. Save us some pie.”
“Roger, wait,” Kate said. “I thought maybe yo
u had some news about Sean O’Shay.”
“Who the hell is Sean O’Shay?”
“Theresa’s friend, remember? He was coming over for dessert tonight.”
Tejeda felt the fog rolling in around the edges again. “So?”
“His parents are frantic,” Kate said. “First thing this morning he told his mother he was going to work out at the high-school pool. But he never got there.”
16
Sean O’Shay’s parents waited for Tejeda in the chief’s office, their faces washed with a too-familiar blank shock. Tejeda refilled two Styrofoam cups with coffee, taking his time. He didn’t think he could make it through one more set of parents, trying to explain how such a horrible thing could have happened to their much-loved son.
The questions they asked were simple, yet unanswerable. They had raised Sean for the future, but somehow he suddenly existed only in the past. They needed help to make the transition, something concrete to hold on to. Why? they wanted to know. What cause or event had been worth such a huge expenditure?
Tejeda had tried to explain how Sean’s death fitted into the fabric of some maniac’s plan, and how he was sorry as hell because that plan had something—what, he wished he knew—to do with himself. But nothing seemed to register.
Where was the logic? It was like when he was eight and he smashed his mother’s Dresden lamp. “You’d better have a very good reason for this,” she had cried. But there was no reason that was weighty enough to balance the loss; he had been goofing around with a football in the living room. She had demanded logic too, and all he could do then was what he wanted to do now: stand up and yell, “It’s my fault, I’ll fix it, please leave me alone.”
He had swept the remains of the lamp into a bag and stuffed them behind old paint cans in the garage. Now, thirty-some years later, they had come spilling out, reminding him that some things, no matter how precious, can’t be fixed. Ever.
“Lieutenant?” The sergeant on desk watch poked his head into the bull pen. “Couple people out front to see you.”
“Who?”
“A Mr. and Mrs. Morrow.”
Tejeda handed the coffees to the sergeant. “Take these into the chief’s office, will you? Tell him where I am.”
“Yeah, sure,” the sergeant muttered as Tejeda, temporarily reprieved from one set of tragic faces, went out to face another.
The Morrows sat together in their neat Iowa clothes, as colorless as the institutional-beige wall. Only the glassy shine in Mr. Morrow’s eyes showed life. He stood when he saw Tejeda.
“We saw on the news you found the remains of a boy,” Mr. Morrow challenged. “Why didn’t you call us? We was in the motel all night, so don’t say you couldn’t reach us.”
“Mr. Morrow, I’m sorry you came down here.” Tejeda pulled out a molded plastic chair and straddled it to face them. “I know how much you want us to find the remains of your son. Believe me, I would give anything if the body we found tonight was Wally.”
Mrs. Morrow gasped. “You mean it isn’t?”
“I’m sorry.”
She gripped her husband’s arm. “Another boy was killed?”
Tejeda nodded.
“Your address was on the police report,” she said, startling him with this bit of inside information. “Was another boy found up at your place?”
He started to say no, but held it back; sometimes the truth was the biggest lie.
Mr. Morrow pulled his mouth into a rigid, lipless buttonhole. “Do you ever think about divine retribution, sir?”
Tejeda shrugged; he had learned from listening to the nuns in grade school when to turn his attention off. He was looking at Wallace Morrow Sr.’s stiff grimace, wondering how Mrs. Morrow ever managed to find enough lip to kiss, and gaining fast insight into why Wallace Jr. had gone outside looking for male affection.
“Back home our pastor, Dr. Johansen, tells us that people have to pay for their sins, in this world as well as the next.”
Tejeda sighed. “I’m sure we’ll get this killer behind bars real soon.”
“I’m sure you will,” Mr. Morrow harrumphed. “But I was referring to you.”
Tejeda turned his full attention back on. “Excuse me?”
“My wife tells me you live outside the sanctity of marriage.”
Tejeda got up and set his chair back against the wall. “It’s getting late, Mr. Morrow.”
“Has it occurred to you, Lieutenant Tejeda, that the carnage that has visited your home is a message from God? Who has died except sodomites? The Lord rained fire and brimstone from out of heaven on Sodom and Gomorrah and all its inhabitants.”
“Go home,” Tejeda said. “When we find anything about your son, we’ll call you.”
“Give it some thought, sir,” Morrow said, stabbing a finger into Tejeda’s air space.
Tejeda walked away, leaving the Morrows to gather their plastic raincoats and the thread of their fractured lives. Kate had said that Mrs. Morrow was spooky. But the woman didn’t hold a candle to her husband.
Tejeda used a note from the D.A. as an excuse for a break from grieving parents. Hymie Osawa, the assistant D.A. prosecuting Arty Silver, wanted to see him downstairs in the forensics lab.
He found Osawa bent over a microscope at Vic Spago’s compulsively neat worktable.
“This is great, Vic,” Hymie said. “But it sure fucks things up.”
Tejeda looked over Hymie’s shoulder. “What’s the problem?”
“Want the bad news or the good news?”
“You call it.”
“Take a look. Some of the samples Vic got from that shed you found on the Marine base are human blood. So far, three are compatible with three of the victims on the indictment against Arty Silver: Frost, Martinez, and Fong.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“That is the bad news.” Hymie rubbed his eyes and groped for his bifocals. “The timing couldn’t be worse. I’m set for trial Monday morning and I don’t need this shit. But you know the rules of discovery. I have to inform Arty’s defense that Vic here has new evidence. You know what Axel is going to do with this? First he’ll need six or eight weeks to study it all, during which time we’ll probably lose enough jurors so that we’ll waste a few more weeks trying to get a full panel again. We’re looking at an Easter start date.
“That’s bad enough. But Dick Tracy here has segregated semen samples from maybe two dozen different men. That’s two dozen unidentified suspects Axel will bring into court if we try to put Arty in that shed.
“You know what you have here?” Hymie handed Tejeda a slide labeled O +. “You have here the germ of doubt that Axel will plant in the minds of the jurors.”
“You have strong evidence and a silver tongue,” Tejeda said. “You can overcome.”
“Maybe,” Hymie said. “Except for the good-news part of Vic’s findings.”
Tejeda looked down at Vic. “Tell me.”
“I found positive, fresh blood samples in the shed too. It’ll take five days, a week, for the results of a DNA print. But I’m laying book on Wally Morrow.”
“You see?” Hymie leaned backed and sighed. “The seed germinates. Arty’s been in the lockup for five years, but here is evidence of an ongoing series of murders.”
Vic pulled out a stack of grisly color photographs. “I compared the hack marks on the vertebrae of O’Shay and Morrow to several of Arty’s victims. The blades are different, but the patterns are similar.”
Hymie groaned. “Put a lid on it, Vic.”
Tejeda picked up two of the photographs, close-ups of the severed necks of two of Arty’s last victims. It bothered him that he had lost the names of these boys, but he remembered the cases and how they fitted into Arty’s scenario. He turned to Vic. “Do you think it’s possible Arty is innocent?”
“Not for a minute,” Vic said.
“Then what do we have?”
“A copycat,” Vic said.
“You think Arty found himself another schnook l
ike William Tyler?” Hymie asked.
Tejeda shook his head. “It’s more than that. Tyler couldn’t even make it through one killing and mutilation without folding. It would take someone with major problems of his own to pull off two. The first requirement for a serial killer is an obsessive personality, and what I’m seeing is obsession—obsession with the Arty Silver case or some aspect of it. Whoever he is, he has damned good inside information.”
“Anyone in mind?” Hymie asked.
“Not specifically,” Tejeda said. “Everywhere I’ve gone for the last five years, the families of Arty’s victims have tracked me down, giving me clues they think they’ve dug up, demanding that I do more. Hymie, I know you run the same gauntlet.”
“Yeah. The Silver Threads are worse than rock-star groupies sometimes. I know that Alma Pappas goes through my office trash. And Arty’s family can be just as persistent.”
“God, when I think of some of the stunts family members have pulled over the years,” Tejeda said. “Murder can unhinge anyone whose bolts are a little loose to begin with. It’s difficult for anyone to deal with that abrupt interruption in a relationship, but especially so if there were unresolved conflicts. We’ve seen siblings who had secretly wished their brothers, sisters dead since birth. When the sibling dies, two things happen. First he feels guilty about his thoughts, then he feels happy because now he can be the center of his parents’ universe. But the parents are so involved with their grief, they can’t even see him, so he wants to kill the sib all over again. It’s frustrating as hell.
“Happens to parents, too, when they have ambivalent feelings for a problem child who dies. They sometimes do something drastic, take violent revenge, to prove to themselves that they loved the little bugger.”
Vic chuckled. “See what happens when you give a cop a college degree?”
“Forget it,” Hymie said. “He read all that stuff in Dear Abby.”
“And that’s the truth,” Tejeda said. “Hymie, can you get me in to to see Arty Silver tonight?”
Half a Mind (The Kate Teague Mysteries) Page 15